10-Minute Neighborhoods: The Low-Tech Solution to Almost* Everything
Health. Energy. Climate. Crime. Education. Happiness. Water. Housing. What if it were possible
to make headway on all these issues with simple changes to our neighborhoods?
Act: Inspiration featured
Podcast: The Case for Worker Cooperatives and Economic Democracy
The latest episode of the Upstream podcast takes a deep dive into the worker cooperatives movement: a broad selection of organizations, activists, and cooperatively-structured workplaces that advocate for and embody workplace and economic democracy.
Robert Macfarlane: “The Metaphors we Use Deliver us Hope, or they Foreclose Possibility”
These debates are precisely what makes the Anthropocene so valuable as an idea. It stops us short. It buttonholes us. It head-butts us. Then it asks us really, really hard questions while we’re reeling. I think that’s where its value lies.
Building a Cooperative Economy
Platform cooperatives that are member owned and democratically controlled – allowing everyone that is affected by the business, be they customers, suppliers, workers or investors, a say in how the business is run and managed.
Only Radical Environmental Activism Can Bring About Whole-System Change
But transitioning beyond a growth-dependent industrial economy will require a multidimensional transformation, not just outward political and economic change, but radical cultural and psychological change as well.
How Artists and Neighbors Turned a Bomb Site Into a Medicine Garden
It was a fenced-off World War II bomb site that had rewilded, and a team of London artists decided it was the perfect place to grow a medicine garden. The site is in the middle of a social housing complex in the Bethnal Green neighborhood of Tower Hamlets, a London borough that has become the U.K.’s second most densely populated local authority, the basic unit of local government.
Blueprint for an Earth Jurisprudence Economy
The journey towards an Earth jurisprudence economy, rather than being seen as an insurmountable challenge, can serve as a uniting force in our defense of the global commons.
Can ‘Localism’ Restore Sanity to Politics?
This is localism, a bottom-up, practically oriented way of looking at today’s biggest policy dilemmas. Instead of always or only seeking to fix municipal issues through national policy, localism suggests that communities can and should find solutions to their own particular problems, within their own particular contexts.
Review: Lifeline by Catherine McGuire
McGuire’s book is an adventure that scores on every front, from its tense action scenes, to its finely realized characters and emotionally involving drama, to its richly rendered settings, to the intriguing irony of its double-entendre title.
Blockchain as a Force for Good: How this Technology could Transform the Sharing Economy
When we find ourselves in a world fully immersed in blockchain, we will find that it is a permanently transformed one — one where cooperatives, schools, and neighborhood groups have many of the same technological advantages as governments and multinational corporations.
Madrid’s Community Gardens
In common with other critical social movements, the community gardens presented their demands under the umbrella of the right to the city, understood not as a legal claim, but as citizens’ right to intervene in the city, to build it and transform it.
Favianna Rodriguez says Climate Change Imagery Lacks a Human Touch
I would like to see less images specifically about the traditional view of nature. For years, for decades, for centuries, many of the spaces of nature just have not been accessible — or have been only accessible to a limited few, mostly elites, mostly white people. So to use imagery that doesn’t invite all of us to participate is a mistake.
